Family Accuses Long Island School for Cover Up in Brutal Attack

TO GO WITH STORY BY JENNIE MATTHEW "The bail bond queen and a controversial US industry"
Michelle Esquenazi (C), known as The Bail Bond Queen, poses with her agents and bodyguards in front of the courthouse in Hempstead, New York, on December 4, 2015. Esquenazi, the mother of four with a "masters degree from the streets of Brooklyn" who worked her way up from a paralegal student on welfare to CEO of a phenomenally successful company. AFP PHOTO/JEWEL SAMAD / AFP / JEWEL SAMAD (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

A 16-year-old high school student’s family is filing court papers on the premise that a Long Island school failed to intervene a racially motivated attack by a white student, and the school covered up the issue.

Zion Guzman-Milton had to get 32 stitches in his head two years ago after he underwent an emergency surgery to lessen the swelling in his brain after a knock punch by a White student at Valley Stream South High School. He experienced a hemorrhage and a skull fracture, and the family is stating that the assault was racially motivated.

Guzman-Milton said that he was hit while getting a book from his locker. The other student approached him and began calling him racial slurs, like Afrojack. When Guzman-Milton tried to walk away, the other student him and afterwards, he remembers being in the nurse’s office.

Zion’s family is making a statement via the court papers that the school did not do anything to notify authorities, and that the family has to call the ambulance themselves as well as get the police involved.

Guzman-Milton’s father, Chris Milton, said that the principal was angry when the police arrived.

“This lady was very disrespectful, saying that we did something to them as opposed to something happening in the school to our son,” he said.

What’s worse is that when Guzman-Milton saw the man who assaulted him in school a few weeks afterwards and he has been bullied and harassed ever since he was punched. Both he and his family are trying to bring the conversation about race to the front before the situation gets unhealthier.

“I believe that my son would probably have been in jail if he would have done that to a white child, for sure,” Milton said.

A spokesperson from the Valley Stream South High School has declined to comment about the situation.

(Photo Credit: Jewel Samal /AFP)

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Travis Henry is a senior at Rutgers University studying Communication, with a concentration in Strategic Public Relations and Public Communication, and French. Currently, he is looking at the relationship between consumer brands and African-American youth and how the Black-white racial segregation has manifested online. When he is not doing research at school or writing at work, he finds himself “curating the human experience” via his magazine DWNTWN and editing his school’s magazine Voice. He sees himself in the future finding a career that hybrids music, activism, media, and writing.